Astronomers capture detailed photos of planet-forming disks around faraway stars

April 30 (UPI) -- Astronomers have captured an array of high-resolution images of planet-forming disks forming around distant stars.

The photos -- detailed Thursday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics -- could help scientists better understand the evolution of young planetary systems, and ultimately gain new insights into the formation of our own solar system.

It's not the first time scientists have spotted protoplanetary disks around young stars, but such images have mostly offered researchers a blurry look at the phenomenon.

"In these pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels," lead researcher Jacques Kluska, an astronomer at KU Leuven in Belgium, said in a news release. "We needed to visualize these details to be able to identify patterns that might betray planet formation and to characterize the properties of the disks."

Kluska and his colleagues deployed a new observation technique called infrared interferometry using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope's PIONIER instrument. The imaging method doesn't record a direct photo of the source. Instead the telescope fields spectral data that is analyzed using a mathematical reconstruction technique. Scientists used a similar strategy to capture the first images of a black hole.

"We had to remove the light of the star, as it hindered the level of detail we could see in the disks," Kluska said.

Scientists were able to distinguish details at the scale of the orbits of rocky planets like Earth or Jupiter from hundreds of light-years away -- the equivalent of spotting a hair from more than six miles away.

"Infrared interferometry is becoming routinely used to uncover the tiniest details of astronomical objects," said Jean-Philippe Berger, researcher at the University of Grenoble-Alpes. "Combining this technique with advanced mathematics finally allows us to turn the results of these observations into images."

Within the circumstellar disks featured in new images, astronomers were able to identify tiny irregularities. These differences suggests density variability among the disk of protoplanetary debris, differences that can kickstart the kind of accumulation necessary for planet formation.

"There could be instabilities in the disk that can lead to vortices where the disk accumulates grains of space dust that can grow and evolve into a planet," Kluska said.

Scientists plan to use infrared interferometry to survey the disks surrounding a variety star types, including older stars.